“Of course we didn’t know these were inconveniences while we were growing up. It was the same for everyone else we knew,” reflected Sister Marita. “Most of the money that people had back then went into the farmland,” Tom added, smiling. “As long as doors shut and the windows opened, everything was okay.”
The Rother family never thought of themselves as being poor, except perhaps when the wheat crop was hailed out or, as Tom remembered, “the year the drought hit and we could cut wheat all day and we wouldn’t fill a truck.” But the number of good years in between kept farmers hopeful from year to year.
The large family garden could be watered from the tall windmill close to the barn, Sister Marita explained, and it provided much fresh produce for their meals in the summer months. Countless hours were spent canning enough vegetables, fruit, and meat to get them through the cold winter months. Raising chickens and milk cows provided the family with milk, cream, butter, eggs, and meat. Money from selling eggs and cream at the grocery store, recalled the Rother siblings, helped them to buy necessities like flour, sugar, rice, cocoa, and other condiments. With these they were able to have homemade bread, cinnamon rolls, pies, and cakes. “Our mother was the best cook and baker!” said Tom and Sister Marita.
According to Stanley’s first biographer, Father David Monahan,* a favorite memory of Gertrude about her oldest son took place on an ordinary afternoon as the family feasted on watermelon. After the group went back to work, discarding the watermelon rinds outside, Gertrude had a good laugh at the sight of a young Stan in the yard with a rind encircling his neck.
By the age of five, each of the Rother children joined in the work of the farm, with specific chores assigned to each one. The younger ones helped collect eggs and feed the chickens, and by age eight, everyone milked the cows. The family had five or six milk cows, and they had to be milked twice daily: at 6:30 in the morning and at 5:00 in the evening. This took 30 to 45 minutes, including separating the milk from the cream. On school days, this meant wearing old clothes for chores, then changing into overalls for the boys and a dress for Sister Marita before going to school.
Stanley began driving the family tractor when he was 10 years old, and it became obvious from the beginning that he excelled at learning and working with anything that required mechanical know-how. His father, Franz, liked to tell the story of how he “rigged up a safety belt” for Stanley when he began to drive the tractor, in order to keep him from falling off the tractor seat and being run over by a disc plow or other device.
In spite of tough conditions, Tom remembered with pride being about nine years old and going out with his big brother to do chores, check the ponds — and cut the wheat. “I drove the truck, and Stan would push up and dump the wheat into it. I’d start the truck and move it to another terrace so that he could dump into it. There wasn’t anything that Stan wouldn’t tackle,” Tom added with admiration. “And he could pretty well fix just about anything.”
To this day, Sister Marita remembers vividly the moments when kid’s play blended into family chores and duties. There’s the time when Jim, Stanley, and Sister Marita carried out their assigned chore of collecting eggs — and then proceeded to make mud pies with several eggs behind the chicken house. It was all great fun until that evening when their mother made a chocolate cake for dessert, and the kids didn’t get any because, as she told them, “Yours is out behind the chicken house.”
Or the time that Stanley keenly observed his sister as she carefully propped her mystery novel over the sink in order to steal a few lines of reading while she washed or dried the dishes. Hours later, when he knew she’d be reading in her bedroom, as Sister Marita intensely focused on the story line of Murder in the Nunnery, Stanley sneaked down the hall and shouted in front of her open door — making Sister Marita scream and her book go flying high.
“Stanley is a tease, in little things,” she laughed, remembering that story. “He is 14 months older than I am,” she added, unaware of using the present tense. “We are very close.”
For the Rothers in Okarche, experiencing the extended family took on a whole new meaning since they lived among their relatives. You could walk across a field and be at a relative’s house, Sister Marita described. Like any other siblings, the foursome got along well — though they had the normal sibling fights. She remembered once in the flare of a fight throwing a tin can at Stanley. “I was scared to death when I saw he was bleeding.” The can cut him above an eye, giving him a small scar for the rest of his life.
Life for the Rothers centered on the family, the farm, and the Church and its traditions. From an early age, Stanley and his siblings learned the importance of prayer and praying together as a family. Whether to attend church on Sunday was never a question. And learning what it meant to live the Catholic faith and its practices was an everyday affair, such as kneeling by their chairs around the kitchen table after supper to pray the Rosary.
“We prayed a lot together as a family, and I know that’s what drew us closer,” Sister Marita explained. “During meals we carried on a conversation — except for one night a week when my parents liked to listen to a program on the radio called ‘The Squeaking Door’ [Inner Sanctum Mysteries show],” she said, laughing. “I didn’t like that, so I busied myself doing other things.”
Perhaps like many German families, the Rothers were not “touchy-feely,” as youngest brother Tom explained it. And they didn’t take time to talk a whole lot about emotions or personal things. He described Stanley, in particular, as being “so quiet. It was hard to carry on a conversation unless one really worked at it. You had to pump and to pump!”
Even a decision as significant as going to the seminary — or to the convent — was not a public topic for discussion. So when Stanley graduated from high school and Sister Marita decided to leave for the convent at the end of her junior year, the brother and sister were shocked to find out that they were both moving away at the same time.
“No, I didn’t talk to him about it. And I didn’t know he was going to the seminary. We didn’t feel the need to discuss it, evidently,” Sister Marita said, smiling.
School: A Family Competition
In 1941, Stanley Francis Rother began first grade at Holy Trinity Catholic School, beginning the string of little Rothers that the nuns liked to describe as “the three little bears,” all one year apart.
Harold Wittrock, his cousin and classmate from first grade through high school, described Stanley as “an average all-American boy who participated in all the functions of school as a normal boy. Stan was real sincere. Whatever his potential was, he did everything with his abilities to be the best he could. He never sloughed off. He wasn’t a quitter.”
All the Rother children attended the two-storied red brick Holy Trinity Catholic School, from first grade through high school. The primary grades were located in the basement of the building. The intermediate grades were on the first floor. And the high school took over the top floor.
Sister Marita still remembers being competitive in her family, especially with Stanley. In their small Holy Trinity School, where two grades often shared one room, this meant the brother and sister were frequently together in one classroom: “I think all of us were pretty good students. We were expected to do well in school.”
At the same time, she also remembers Stanley looking out for her as early as grade school. “I won’t say he was a protector, but he did make sure that I was okay. He looked after me in school, and he did that even after we were grown. In his letters, he would always ask, ‘How’s everything going? Are you happy in what you’re doing? How’s life treating you?’ ”
Most of Stanley’s teachers at Holy Trinity were sisters from the Adorers of the Blood of Christ religious community, based in Wichita, Kansas.